Rent Love and Mercy (2014)

Beach Blanket Burnout - Love and Mercy review by Count Otto Black

It's hard to give this film an accurate star rating because it's really two interwoven one-hour films about events that happen 30 years apart. If the sixties half of it had been expanded into an entire movie, with the later part reduced to an epilogue or a framing story, it would deserve 5 stars. Paul Dano is superb as the young and very troubled Brian Wilson, achieving both commercial and artistic success because he's an enormously talented musician, while simultaneously falling apart due to a combination of having an absolutely dreadful control-freak father who wants to be a pop star by proxy through his sons (that sort of domestic arrangement seldom works out too well in the long run - exactly the same thing happened to Michael Jackson), and taking LSD when he already has schizophrenic tendencies, which is never, ever a good idea! (See "The Devil & Daniel Johnston" for further details.)

The lengthy scenes of some of the Beach Boys' best songs being put together in the studio by an incredibly committed, sometimes manic Brian Wilson are riveting, and truly succeed in conveying how talented you have to be to produce a genuinely brilliant piece of music of that complexity, even if it's only a 3-minute pop-song. And of course, the fact that the end results are represented by the actual music of the Beach Boys at the peak of their powers doesn't exactly hurt. Paul Dano is very convincing indeed as a nice young man who just wants to make music but is rapidly descending into madness that terrifies him and he can't make it stop. And it really does look like the early sixties, partly because the director went to the trouble of sometimes using obsolete film-stock so that it resembles the slightly grainy movies we're used to seeing from that era instead of a crystal-clear modern one.

The nineties scenes aren't so great. John Cusack is a bit of a cliché as the pitiful, twitching man-child Brian Wilson has become, and not terribly interesting. As for Elizabeth Banks as the unbelievably nice car salesperson who saves him from the frightful Dr. Landy, she's just plain dull. And there's far more simplification and whitewashing going on in this part of the film than the sixties portion, which is by all accounts painfully accurate. In particular, the fact that Brian Wilson's next of kin made an extremely dodgy psychiatrist his legal guardian and let this quack control every aspect of his life is never addressed. The truth is that the combined effects of alcoholism, cocaine addiction, massive abuse of various other substances, severe mental illness, and weighing 300 pounds were so obviously going to kill him in the very near future that they had no choice but to turn him over to the one guy who could control him well enough to save his life, and unfortunately that short-term fix eventually went horribly wrong. But here we see a pathetic innocent saved by a knight in shining armour (female for a change) from a parasitic monster who is 100% to blame for everything, because that's neater and cleaner than the real story. And what's with that huge visual reference to "2001 - A Space Odyssey"???

So it's a film of two halves, one of which is far better than the other. But that half is so good that it's well worth seeing the film. As for the lesser half, the constant switching between sixties and nineties means that it keeps returning to the part you're really interesting in before you have time to get bored. All the same, I wish it had been a whole movie about Brian Wilson's descent into madness, and the menagerie of crazies he hung out with more and more as he drifted away from the other Beach Boys. To mention just one name: Charles Manson...

Love and Mercy. - Love and Mercy review by AR

Love and Mercy is the telling of two time periods in the life of The Beach Boys songwriter Brian Wilson. One period is set in the 60's showing Wilson (played by Paul Dano) about to react the peak of his creative and artistic powers with the recordings of the Pet Sounds and Smile albums but also it shows his personal downward spiral with mental and drug problems and the strain it is putting on his relationship with his follow Beach Boys.

The second period is set in the 80's when Wilson (Played by John Cusack) was under the thumb of Doctor Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti) a radical therapist who was hired at first to help Brian out of his drug addiction and provide treatment from his mental state, but eventually became a Svengali figure who controlled every aspect of Wilson's life. This is when Brian met Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) and their blossoming relationship is the main arc of the story.

I personally think the 60's is the part the film is far more interested in. It's when the film is most alive, creative and psychological. The 80's part seems a like a sub-par TV movie. Paul Dano's Wilson is the superior performance. Cusack unfortunately seems to be playing Wilson like every character he has played before. Banks gets nothing really to do apart from love interest and Giamatti is OTT as Landy.

The Wilson/Landy relationship is just waiting to be made into a film, it's that messed up.

Beach Boys fans definitely investigate this film. The 60's parts are the best bits.

Terrific if the subject interests you - Love and Mercy review by MW

It did me. Yes some of the acting is a bit hammy (though the young Brian is magnificent) but the recreation of the early-period recordings and falling out is magnificent, as is the music (natch). While I enjoyed it a lot, I felt that it was too one paced and, in places one dimensional, to really grab the interest of someone who didn't come to the film already wanting to watch it. I did. If you don't, then beware.